Nar. umjet. 36/1, 1999, pp. 173-182, T.

Magrini, Where Does Mediterranean Music

Begin?
Conference paper Received: 22nd Dec. 1998 Accepted: 16th Feb. 1999
UDK 78(262-92)

TULLI A MAGRI NI
Department of Music and Performing Arts, University of Bologna,
Bologna

WHERE DOES MEDITERRANEAN

MUSIC BEGIN?

The paper focuses on the work done within the ICTM Study Group on
the Anthropology of Mediterranean Cultures with the aim of
presenting and discussing some approaches to the study of
"Mediterranean" music. In particular, it deals with the possible
meanings of the term "Mediterranean" in musical studies.
Keywords: anthropology of music, Mediterranean music

Although the term "Mediterranean" was originally strictly a geographical

one, towards the middle of this century it took on a more complex
meaning, both from an historical and an anthropological point of view,
thanks to the classic work of Braudel (1949) and of scholars such as Pitt-
-Rivers and Peristiany. A literature on the "Mediterranean" thus originated
in a multinational perspective, as part of both the tendency toward "global
history" championed by Braudel, and of the comparative approach
adopted by the Oxford school of social anthropology (Peristiany 1966).
In particular, the contributions by the Oxford school initiated a widespread
tendency to consider the Mediterranean as a culture area, a tendency that,
after gaining considerable authority, has lost some of its momentum in
recent times. Even though Peristiany and Pitt-Rivers have claimed recently
that they never meant "to establish the Mediterranean as a 'culture area'"
(Peristiany & Pitt-Rivers 1992:6), several scholars have criticized the
unified notion of the Mediterranean that has informed the contributions of
the Oxford school, thus opening up a discussion (e.g. Gilmore 1987;
Boissevain 1979; Piña Cabral 1989) which has not yet come to an end,
although it has perhaps been somewhat overtaken thanks to the new
orientations of anthropology in recent years.
In the field of music anthropology, a new study group on "The
Anthropology of Music in Mediterranean Cultures" was created in 1992
within the International Council for Traditional Music (see Magrini 1993).

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Begin?

Some scholars have understood this initiative as an attempt to extend to

musical studies the unifying hypothesis that had already been proposed
for other social and cultural aspects of the countries bordering on the
Mediterranean. This meeting is an excellent opportunity for me to clear up
this misunderstanding and to show that the objectives which I, as the
founder of the study group, personally set myself were completely
different.
My first objective was to promote research on the human and social
aspects of music in an area in which music had been studied primarily
from historical and technical/theoretical perspectives, and according to the
philological and documentaristic methods of musical folklore. With few
exceptions (e.g. De Martino 1975; 1976), music had not been explored in
Mediterranean countries as a means for understanding man and society. In
my view, this state of affairs was not only a weakness in
ethnomusicological literature, but also represented a great opportunity that
had until then been missed.
Secondly, the choice of studying music as a human and social
phenomenon in the Mediterranean was particularly challenging because of
the cultural complexity of this area. For one thing, what do Mediterranean
countries have in common? Basically, they have in common six thousand
years of history during which they came into contact with one another
(e.g. Davis 1993). As they fought against and dominated each other, they
also traded goods, encountered the art of their neighbours, spread
religions, and generated the most striking syncretisms. A feature which is
particularly Mediterranean is the depth of information we have on its past.
This gives our study a particular importance, since it allows us to deal with
the issue of time, an issue which was often absent from anthropological
and ethnomusicological studies. Furthermore, the history of the
Mediterranean is extraordinarily rich: for example, if there is one
geographical area in the world which prefigured the postmodern
condition, this is certainly the Mediterranean area, in which Hellenism
became the first historical experience of globalization — albeit on a
relative scale. In this sense, studying Mediterranean cultures through music
allows us to place the research into music as a human and social
phenomenon in a unique historical perspective, and to acquire critical
instruments for better understanding the present.
I do not, however, want to assert that their history renders these
territories culturally homogeneous. On the contrary, the "Mediterranean" is
fascinating because it represents better than others a place in which one
encounters countless diversities, and because it enables us to observe the
ways in which these diversities manage to coexist, ignore each other, know
each other, come into conflict, or blend.
For example, if we observe Mediterranean territories from the
perspective of art music since the end of the Middle Ages, we see a world
split into two halves. One part, the north, is completely projected towards

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Begin?

continental Europe through the interaction between the music of

Mediterranean Europe with Flanders, Germany, England and northern
France. The other part, the south, is spread out horizontally from Maghreb
to Turkey and bears a wealth of continuities with the musical world of Iran
and India. From this point of view, the Mediterranean Sea constitutes more
an element of division than of continuity. At the same time, it should be
remembered that, despite being separated from each other, the countries
bordering on the Mediterranean were able to export cultural products and
to considerably influence even extremely distant countries. This fact
presents itself on the musical level as another exemplification of Braudel's
argument about the "widened Mediterranean".
On other musical levels, the Mediterranean presents itself rather as a
mosaic of profoundly localized realities, where specific musical practices
take root in particular social contexts and assume a profound meaning in
terms of socio-cultural identity. I shall mention a few examples: for
instance, the rizitika songs of the westernmost region of Crete, the Nomos
Chanion (Magrini 1981 and forthcoming); the practices of improvised
lyrical singing in southern Italy, which differ from each other from village
to village (Magrini 1986; 1998a); the instrumental practice of the kemence
of the Turks of the Black Sea, along with infinite other cultural realities of
strictly local significance (Stokes 1993). In these contexts it is in fact the
differentiation at the local or regional level that explains the proliferation
of repertoires, of performance practices, and of instrumental practices.
But there also exist consistent phenomena of musical syncretism in
the Mediterranean. These are the fruits of cultural encounters caused by
unique historical events and by the ability of certain social groups to
develop them in a particular way. Perhaps it would be worth using the term
"Mediterranean music" in the strict sense only for those musical
phenomena that have their roots in the contact and contamination between
cultural realities which actually come from different parts of the
geographical Mediterranean. In this sense, we would use the term for those
musical phenomena which cross the sea, which have in their DNA a genetic
patrimony that unites elements of different cultures, and which carry the
historical memory of contacts within the Mediterranean.
This perspective, to which I will return later on, seems to me
particularly interesting because it allows one both to point to the
Mediterranean inasmuch as it is a place of interaction on the historical
level, and at the same time to bear in mind what is going on in the
Mediterranean today on the level of popular music, where there exists a
consistent tendency toward contamination. Hybrid repertoires prevail in
this field today, for example in mizrakhit music (e.g. Regev 1996), where
the Hebrew language is mixed with Arab musical elements, bringing about
a cultural fusion that unexpectedly triumphs over deeply-rooted ethnic
and political hostilities.

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Begin?

If we exclude those kinds of music in which a fusion of different

Mediterranean cultural realities is brought about, and which are generated
either by complex historical events or, more recently, by the postmodern
tendency to contamination, it is quite difficult to establish what
Mediterranean music is, where it begins and ends, and, finally, what is
meant by the term.
During our study group's work we deliberately avoided establishing
precise boundaries for our area of study. For now the task of establishing
the geographical extension of our arguments has been entrusted to the
sensibility of the specialists in the individual areas and to the coordinators
of the group. A definition of the boundaries might perhaps emerge as a
final result of our work and might even bring about a reconsideration of
the traditional classifications.
This problem can be illustrated by considering the particularly
complex case of Italian folk music. Traditionally the music of the oral
tradition in Italy was distinguished into two profoundly diversified realities,
northern music and that of the south, linked by a musical area — — that
of central Italy — that in certain respects has its own characteristics but in
other aspects is also linked to the two neighbouring realities (e.g. Leydi
1973).
The music of northern Italy is considered profoundly "European",
particularly because of the role that the ballad and polyphony in thirds has
had in it and which connects it to other musical realities of the continent.
The music of southern Italy, on the other hand, is considered
"Mediterranean", because of the prevalence of solistic singing, the
widespread occurrence of a vocality pushed into the high register, the use
of melismatic melodies that bring it closer to the music of the southern
shores of the Mediterranean. This general division has its roots in Alan
Lomax's historical research in Italy in 1954 and in his emphasis on vocal
style and on the opposition between monody and choral music in his
definition of musical areas (Lomax 1955-1956) — elements which Lomax
later developed and perfected in his famous work, Cantometrics. The
problematic aspect of this division is that, according to this classification,
the music of the coastal regions of northern and central Italy appears to be
connected more to Europe than to the Mediterranean.
Now, it is indeed true that, for example, the repertoires of ballads of
the Veneto or Liguria are connected to the repertoires of the other
northern Italian regions and of other European countries and in this sense
confirm the "continental" nature of the music of northern Italy. At the
same time, we must not forget the role that centres of political and cultural
power such as Venice and Genoa have played in the heart of the
Mediterranean or omit to look for the historical consequences on the level
of music. For example, the spread of the violin in Crete, an island whose
"Mediterranean-ness" cannot be doubted, is historically attributed to
Venice's rule there from 1210 to 1669 and therefore represents a

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Begin?

documentation of the Italian city's Mediterranean role. At the same time, it

must be observed that the music played on the violin in Crete was not the
slightest bit Venetian or Italian (e.g. Magrini 1981; 1997). This is
therefore one of the many examples where that which was transmitted is
simply an object that was readapted to local musical reality.
Even if one cannot exclude the possibility that the violin was
originally imported to Crete with a repertoire of its own of northern Italian
origin, neither historical documentation nor any trace in the repertoires
and musical practices of this century remain of it. With this example, I
would like to point out to the difficulty of tidily winding up the skein of
geographical, historical and strictly sonorous threads when trying to decide
on the amount of "Mediterranean-ness" to assign to the phenomena we
examine — in this case, the Mediterranean-ness of music in the area of
Venice.1
In my opinion another interesting case that is offered by Italian folk
culture is the tradition of the Maggio drammatico (Magrini 1992), a form
of musical theatre that is common in the Tuscan and Emilian Apennines.
In this kind of theatre the clash between two groups in conflict is
represented, with the two groups often historicized as Moslems and
Christians in different historical or fantastic contexts. It seems that this
form of theatre is typically "Mediterranean" in the sense that it
concentrates on a central theme in the history of the Mediterranean.
But if we ask ourselves what the sources of the scripts of the Maggi
are, it is easy to verify that these texts, in many cases, are based on a re-
-elaboration or imitation of Italian Medieval and Renaissance epic
literature (which is a point of reference for many forms of popular Italian
literature). We might therefore legitimately ask whether what interests the
authors and audiences of the Maggio is the historical memory of distant
political and religious conflicts between Islam and the Christian world
recounted by this literature or rather the basically epic character of the
narrative.
It is, in fact, the epic nature of the action that is essential to the
Maggio, in that it allows for the kind of dramaturgical elaboration that
characterizes it. In addition, it should be remembered that this same kind
of dramaturgical elaboration can also be carried out with reference to
other religious or political conflicts: one example of this is the Maggio
"King David", which takes its material from the Bible.
The cases I have cited serve simply to demonstrate how difficult it is
to go beyond purely geographical criteria and individuate in the musical
repertoires of the Mediterranean countries traces of contacts or historical
references that might expand the local importance of the repertoires to a
properly Mediterranean dimension.

1 In comparison, the musical praxis that characterizes certain Greek islands, like Kerkyra,
which were also dominated by the Venetian, are much more "Italian".

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Begin?

Another, certainly less complex, way to study the musical cultures of

the Mediterranean is to work on the comparative level. In this sense, the
Mediterranean is again a particularly interesting territory, since it allows us
to highlight, by way of contrast, the specificity of single places or areas
and, at the same time, the often unexpected relations between some of
them.
It is on this theme that the most work has been done within the
ICTM study group, also during the recent meeting on "Music as
Representation of Gender" held in Venice in June 1998. By examining the
way of life and musical behaviour in certain Mediterranean countries, the
meeting aimed to put into question the now obsolete image of a region
unified by the syndrome of "honour and shame" (see Magrini 1998b) —
— an image that had stiffened the figures of the men and women of the
Mediterranean into the well-known stereotypes of the male obsessively
committed to the defence of his woman's honour, and of the woman
obsessively committed to demonstrating her modesty, implying a total
passivity on the social level.
A way to confront the stereotype of the uniformity of male and
female behaviour in the Mediterranean was to take the religious variable
into consideration. This allowed us to highlight how the three dominant
religions in the Mediterranean (Islam, Judaism and Christianity), which
share common traits such as monotheism and a masculinist and patriarchal
conception of society, may be connected to different conceptions of
femininity that are also represented at the level of musical events. To give
an example, it is not by coincidence that in Islam where women are
basically considered sexual beings, musical practices directed towards
exalting this sexuality, like the belly dance, are extremely widespread (e.g.
Nieuwkerk 1995; 1998), and that in the Catholic and Orthodox Christian
world — which represses female sexuality and sees woman as essentially an
instrument of reproduction — dances of open sexual seduction are
normally absent from folk repertoires. In this sense, then, it is possible to
work on the differentiation of the musical cultures of the Mediterranean
by comparing them, as was done at the meeting on gender. But we must be
sure to remember that it is always possible to find also examples of deep
syncretism.
I would like to mention the case of a panegyri (a religious orthodox
festival) which I attended in a village on Lesvos, a Greek island a few
kilometres from the Turkish coast. As often happens in Greece, this
religious festival also included evenings of dancing in which almost the
entire community participated. The participants followed the common
practice of the paranghelia: the person who wants to dance pays the
musicians to play a dance which only he who pays and his guests perform,
while the audience looks on. The dance thus becomes a moment of
conscious public representation on the part of the performers. Groups of
friends, groups of family members and even a single couple will dance.
Both dance nights of the panegyri were totally dominated by one couple, a

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Begin?

husband and wife, who carried out a long series of dances, in particular
zeibekika and karsilamades. These dances, compared to other widespread
Greek dances such as the syrtos or the ballos, are characterized by a more
relaxed and sometimes allusive use of the body. Through their dance, the
couple seemed to want to represent an harmonious erotic relationship in
front of the community, which responded in full syntony, expressing
admiration, toasting the couple or offering them drinks and flowers.
The dances performed by that couple during a religious festival,
would have probably been disapproved of in other contexts of
Mediterranean Christianity, Catholic or Orthodox. But that did not happen
at Lesvos, an island that for much of its history was under the rule of the
Turks (from 1462 to 1912) and that assimilated from Ottoman culture the
notion of accepting a public display of eroticism, syncretizing it with a
religious Christian-Orthodox setting. Once again, we have before us a case
of real "Mediterranean-ness", of a synthesis of cultural values belonging to
traditions that are fundamentally different but that nevertheless
encountered one another on this island, making room for a kind of
musical performance that is perceived as completely coherent with the
local culture. To a certain degree this phenomenon is not surprising if
considered from the historical perspective. Until the early twentieth
century, Lesvos belonged to the cultural area dominated by Smyrna, a city
on the coast of Anatolia which, during the last 200 years of the Ottoman
empire, was the most important economic and cultural centre of the Greeks
under Turkish rule. Despite its multicultural character, the population of
Smyrna was in fact largely made up of Greeks (up to 60%). It is not by
chance that it was precisely at Smyrna and in the surrounding area that the
Greek and Turkish musical cultures fused together. This fusion generated
a rich repertoire that the people of Orthodox religion — — who were
expelled from Turkey after the destruction of the city in 1922 following
the unfortunate Greek invasion — brought to many Greek locations
(including Lesvos) but above all to Piraeus and Athens, giving birth to the
repertoire of the café-chantant and becoming one of the components of
the rebetiko (e.g. Holst 1975).
What is particularly interesting about the case of the festival at
Lesvos that we observed is that the syncretism in this case does not
characterize a repertoire of commercial music — a genre that is
traditionally more open to contamination — but even goes so far as to
manifest itself in the ceremonial life of the villages, within the same
religious festivals. The musical event that we observed then becomes even
more complicated to analyse, since it unites multiple elements in a single
phenomenon: a festive Christian-Orthodox religious context, the Greek
praxis of public representation through dance by way of the practice of
paranghelia (e.g. Cowan 1990), the allusive use of the female body which
reminds us of the eroticism of the Turkish belly dance, the performance of
a dance (the zeibekiko) that is originally proper to the Greco-Turkish
culture of Anatolia (Holst 1975:64), a complex range of instruments

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Begin?

(bouzouki, trumpet, guitar, keyboard, drums) that uses a brass wind

instrument, as is only found in Lesvos and in Western Macedonia
(Dionysopoulos 1997:31). This is thus an emblematic case that gathers
together different cultural values from the different landing places of Mare
Nostrum.
Faced with phenomena like this, we can conclude that the term
"Mediterranean" can actually have a much deeper meaning than its merely
geographical one. When we study musical realities whose multiple facets
demonstrate that this sea has been the instrument of an intense cultural
interaction between countries of Europe, of Asia Minor and of Northern
Africa, and that it has been the instrument for the circulation of ideas and
values that cross the boundaries of nations and continents, then it can be
agreed that, rather than to speak, for instance, of Italian, Tunisian or
Turkish music, it is actually appropriate to use the term "Mediterranean".
In this case we have the advantage of being able to allude with only one
word to that collection of historical and cultural relations that has
produced complex musical phenomena, phenomena that it would not be
possible to analyse if not in the light of such relations.

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Begin?

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Nieuwkerk, Karin van. 1998. "'An hour for God and an hour for the heart': Islam,
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GDJE POČINJE MEDITERANSKA GLAZBA?

SAŽETAK

Iako je poimanje Mediterana u osnovi zemljopisno, sredinom ovoga stoljeća taj pojam
preuzima složenije značenje u povijesnoj i antropološkoj perspektivi, a na takav je pristup
utjecao rad Fernanda Braudela i skupine znanstvenika okupljenih u "Oxford School of
Social Anthropology" (Pitt-Rivers, Peristiany). Takav se složeniji i slojevitiji pristup
donedavno nije prepoznavao u studijama o glazbi Mediterana.
Autorica obrađuje rad studijske skupine "Antropologija glazbe u mediteranskim
kulturama" osnovane 1992. godine pri ICTM-u. Ranija su istraživanja glazbenoga folklora
bila u skladu s filološkim i dokumentarističkim metodama i bila su usmjerena na
istraživanje glazbe iz povijesne i tehničko/teorijske perspektive. Namjera je osnivača
studijske skupine posebice potaknuti istraživanja ljudskih i društvenih aspekata glazbe u
mediteranskom području.
Istraživanje mediteranskih kultura putem glazbe omogućava da se glazba, kao
ljudski i društveni fenomen, smjesti u jedinstvenu povijesnu perspektivu, čime se otvaraju
bitne postavke za razumijevanje sadašnjosti. Rad na istraživanju glazbe mediteranskoga
prostora upućuje na poteškoće prevladavanja zemljopisnih kriterija određivanja, ali
omogućava da se u glazbenoj tradiciji pojedinih mediteranskih zemalja iznađu tragovi
dodira i povijesnih odnosa koji mogu proširiti lokalne okvire i vrednovanja glazbenog
nasljeđa u odgovarajuće mediteranske dimenzije.
Ključne riječi: antropologija glazbe, mediteranska glazba

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